Proposal for Tools Supporting Component Based Programming

Our experiences with basing application architectures on component structures have shown us that component based architectures result in several advantages such as greater reuse and consistency, ease of maintenance etc. But there are also a number of problems arising when using binary components. We see most of these problems falling in one of the following categories: Culture and organisation, documentation and component management. We propose a number of tools and related techniques that will help lessen the problems arising when using binary components. The tools will address issues such as auto-generating documentation, managing components in different configurations and formal specification and run-time test of functionality.